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Gottlieb's Girl Scout cookie connection

Digging through decades of old documents for Sunday's story about Gordonston Park turned up some other interesting history involving Savannah and the Girl Scouts. One of the files at the Girl Scout First Headquarters had a receipt tucked among Scout records. It was from Gottlieb's, an old Savannah bakery. According to the notes, Gottlieb's provided the Savannah girls their first commercially baked cookies. The receipt showed that on May 8, 1936, Gottlieb's agreed to provide oatmeal cookies to the Scouts at 7 1/2 cents a box. The girls went on to sell 7,697 dozen cookies. (I can't help thinking the chocolate chewy would have surpassed that!)

Even the taste-testing has a bit of history, said Jami Brantley, the program and collections manager at the headquarters. Gottlieb's baked several types of cookies, and some of the scouts brought in their fathers to sample and select a winner. One of the girls, Brantley said, was a young Scout named Mary Flannery O'Connor. She sometimes submitted troop news to the local Morning News, which may have been her first byline. O'Connor grew up to become an acclaimed writer, and her home on East Charlton Street is a popular tourist stop. As for those Girl Scout cookie sales, Savannah wasn't the first to go commercial. That distinction goes to the Girl Scouts of Great Philadelphia. They began selling commercial cookies in 1934, followed the next year by the Girl Scout Federation of Greater New York. That's according to a Girl Scout website. You can learn more at http://www.girlscouts.org/program/gs_cookies/cookie_history/1930s.asp